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For tennis enthusiasts Wimbledon (29.06-12.07) and Aegon Championship at the Queen's Club heralds the start of the summer feeling and many people are motivated to pull the tennis racquet out of the cupboard and hit the court. It is important that before you step foot onto the court you are doing so having had an exercise regime for some time and making sure you warm up well. Tennis is a sport with a significant amount of injuries. A number of reports claim that statistics show a full 30% of all tennis participants will suffer some sort of tennis injury each year.

Common injuries

Despite the high recall of tennis elbow as a common injury, lower limb (ankle, knee, and thigh) injuries are the most common tennis injuries. Tennis is a sport that requires sudden burst of speed, quick footwork, hard ground strikes and the ability to turn and stretch to in order to return the ball to your opponent.

The efficiency of your running technique is directly proportional to the quality of your posture. We have reviewed the web and talked to some experts to bring you some top tips.

What is good posture? According to many health care disciplines, good posture involves having a reasonably straight spine with not too much straightness and not too much bend. The more you slump, the more your body's muscles need to work to hold you upright. Poor posture not only restricts the circulation of blood to your muscles and organs but also inhibits the oxygen supply to your brain.

We have written before about nutrition tips and top foods particularly for runners but what caught our attention again was watercress trending as a superfood for runners.

Watercress first caught our attention back in 2007 with research by Ulster University published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition stating that watercress can reduce DNA damage to blood cells (which is considered to be an important trigger in the development of cancer) and thus watercress was viewed as an anti-cancer superfood.

For some of us casual cyclist, spring is the time of the year we take the bike out of storage and decide to put some pedal to the metal. Here are some tips to help you shift up the gears quickly this spring.

1 Give your bike some attention

Before you jump on your bike and head off to start of the season make sure you have thoroughly checked its condition. If you are a good mechanic, you could to this yourself, or have your local shop. For a quick initial safety check follow these tips

With Spring well into full flow and runners starting to review their clothing and footwear for the Spring time it is a good opportunity to review whether you need new footwear and what is on the market.

Do I need new footwear?

Of course these days the view might be that I want the latest style, trend or colour in my footwear but what about whether your footwear needs replacing due to wear and tear? How do I know if my footwear need replacing? Of course a quick inspection can determine that your footwear needs replacing plus also reveal your foot type by the wear on the surface areas. It also depends on how often you run, whether you run in the same footwear constantly etc. If you log your training and review the kilometres as a rule, when you start approaching 500-800 kilometres (300-500 miles) on your footwear, begin breaking in a new pair and rotate the two for a few weeks. We covered some tips for checking your footwear and table with the 800 kilometre guideline in our post Are you your feet’s worst enemy?

Having received this unhappy tale of a lost sole we we were delighted to team up with Tony Pryce Sports in Barnstaple with an emergency replacement.

"I have a request and a story you may be able to help me with. I bought a pair of FootBalance custom insoles from a local running shop a few weeks ago, I was just getting used to them and finding them brilliant. When one evening as I was leaving my house to go to my local triathlon club I managed to stupidly leave my pair of running trainers on the roof of my car.

In our last post we wrote about out sports day in Vierumäki sports centre, which hosts The Sport Institute of Finland, a national coaching and training centre for sports and physical education and a number of Finland's top athletes train there. In our last post we reviewed TRX Suspension Training®. We also had the opportunity to take part in a Powerslider training session.